


And Counting

by balloonstand



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-21
Updated: 2017-06-21
Packaged: 2018-11-17 03:05:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,466
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11266638
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/balloonstand/pseuds/balloonstand
Summary: Poe is several long strides ahead of Finn, making much better time up the rocky hillside. His hand checks back on the blaster strapped to his leg with nearly every step. It makes Finn nervous. He is never sure how much danger he is in on these Resistance missions. He gets locations, dates, and objectives; nothing more. He thinks that Poe has information he does not. He thinks he shouldn’t ask him. He is out of breath from the climb and the question would huff out of his lungs on wispy, weak breaths





	And Counting

**Author's Note:**

> This is a very belated birthday present for the ever patient and lovely Olivia. Love you

The planet shivers beneath them. This had been in their mission briefing, the planet’s near-constant seismic activity, and Finn had been prepared something more dramatic than these little quivers, but this suits the odd, dark planet. It suits his odd, dark mood.

  
Poe is several long strides ahead of him, making much better time up the rocky hillside. His hand checks back on the blaster strapped to his leg with nearly every step. It makes Finn nervous. He is never sure how much danger he is in on these Resistance missions. He gets locations, dates, and objectives; nothing more. He thinks that Poe has information he does not. He thinks he shouldn’t ask him. He is out of breath from the climb and the question would huff out of his lungs on wispy, weak breaths.

  
He keeps his head down and counts his steps. It’s something he used to do before. He would count and count and count anything he could distract himself with. He has a thousand tricks to keep his mind occupied and active, but counting is his favorite. He lets himself play with it, makes his stride longer and shorter to make the steps come slower or quicker without falling too far behind Poe or catching up to him. It shouldn’t matter, but Poe set this distance between them and Finn is committed to maintaining it.

  
He is wrapped up in his numbers and his palm itches. It has been itching since he first held that lightsaber. No, it was before that. It has been itching since he fired on First Order pilots from Poe’s gunner seat. His palm itches like he needs to wrap his hand back around that lightsaber or that gun’s trigger. He needs to hold something. A weapon- his palm wants to feel the weight of a weapon, he thinks.

  
Poe keeps climbing and Finn keeps following. Poe leads them up, up like he’s trying to climb back into the sky. Finn’s legs are starting to burn and he counts his steps louder in his head. He is in the thousands now. His palm itches.

  
Fifty-odd more steps and then Poe disappears from his view between two huge boulders. Finn stutters. The planet is dark, the rocks are dark, the sky is far away – too far away to see more than a handful of its stars – and he is alone with his empty hand. The ground trembles for him. He forces himself to take a step ( _one_ , he starts over in his count), then another ( _two_ ), and another ( _three_ ) until he catches sight of Poe again. Poe looks back at him over his shoulder and Finn can see the curve of a smile in his lips and cheek. Finn smiles back reflexively. He isn’t sure if Poe sees it because he is already turning away, his hand checking for his blaster again.

  
_Thirty-four, thirty-five, thirty-si_ x.

  
“Here,” Poe says. Neither of them has said anything for hours, not since they began their climb, and Finn is startled to hear language from outside of his head. Poe seems taken aback by it as well; he has to try again. “We’re here.”

  
Finn looks around. They are nowhere. Poe is watching him with a sly smile on his face, like he is waiting for Finn to figure it out. Finn looks around. Black sky, black ground, black rock, black rock, black rock- cave. He looks from the cave to Poe, whose smile sweetens from sly to proud and Finn smiles back. The planet quakes gently beneath them.

  
“You weren’t kidding about the cave.”

  
“I wasn’t kidding about the cave.”

  
“A cave.”

  
“A cave.”

  
Finn laughs. Poe has been promising him a cave since Finn’s first Resistance mission. When Finn was recovering in the sickbay after- after Starkiller and before he was even able to open his eyes, Poe had told him every story General Organa had ever shared with him about the rebellion against the Empire. Finn had laid in that bed, his back roaring, and had focused on Poe’s words. He had grasped and clutched at them and used them as a rope to pull himself up out of the pain. He had no steps to count, nothing to count at all, so he immersed his being in Poe’s words.

  
Poe had been telling him about General Organa, Han Solo, and the jedi Luke Skywalker landing the Millennium Falcon in a cave that was not a cave at all but the mouth of an asteroid-dwelling creature when Finn had finally been able to open his eyes. After Poe had lurched forward and grabbed Finn’s hand, after he had lurched away just as abruptly and ran to fetch a medic, after Finn’s vitals had been taken and he had been helped into a seated posture, after he had heard his positive and optimistic prognosis- after all of that, Poe had sat back in his chair and smiled lazily and beatifically at Finn.

  
“It was the cave that woke you up, wasn’t it?”

  
_The cave_? Finn can only mouth the words.

  
“The story I was- You woke up because you liked the cave, huh?” Poe slouches in his chair and grins bigger. “If you really want to see a cave, I can make that happen. You’ll start flying missions with me as soon as you’re healed. I find a nice cave for you. Promise.”

Finn had not been able follow Poe’s words very well, but he could tell from his tone of voice that he was making a joke. The corners of Finn’s mouth stretched up on their own and pulled his lips into a smile. Poe’s voice had gotten excited and Finn had drifted back into sleep.

  
Finn and Poe smile at each other now, and Finn wishes he understood their joke better. He feels like he is on the fringes of his own laughter every time. He is grasping it only with his fingertips and he wants to hold it securely in his hand.

  
But he takes what he gets and his laugh is genuine as it mingles with Poe’s in the mouth of the cave. The planet shivers under them and it’s a mirror of their laughter.

  
The laughter finishes and after a quiet breath, Poe tells him more: “We’ll stay here tonight. We can set up the beacon in the cave and then move it up the hill when we’re done.”

  
It doesn’t take them long. Poe does most of the setup, with Finn mostly handing him whatever he points at. It echoes that first time in the Millennium Falcon, with Rey under deck fixing the ship and Finn picking up everything in sight but never what she needed. It’s only an echo though; Finn is here in this cave with Poe and not- he doesn’t know where Rey is. He doesn’t think about it, in the same way that he forces himself to count his steps when his hand itches and his legs hurt and he can’t catch his breath, and Poe is three steps beyond his field of vision.

  
“Help me move this outside,” Poe says, wiping his hands on the legs of his orange pilot jumpsuit. His fingers brush along his blaster.

  
Between the two of them, they shuffle the beacon all the way to the cave mouth. It is cumbersome and unwieldy and Finn is sweating by the time Poe says, “Yeah, here is good.” Finn wipes his face and flops his weight against the beacon. He looks up at the sky and tries to catch his breath. His itchy right hand curls around one of the rods on the beacon. It’s not quite right. It’s not what he really wants to hold.

  
Poe’s head is tilting back on its axis. His dark hair brushes the back of his flight suit as he looks up at the sky. Finn watches Poe’s expression for a long moment before following his gaze up. He wants to see something in the sky to make him feel that craving that is writ large all across Poe’s face, but he doesn’t see anything particular among the stars. He looks back at Poe, then down at his feet.

  
When is his hand going to stop itching? Maybe if he can hold Poe’s blaster he will feel better. More whole, maybe. He almost reaches out right then to take it from Poe’s holster, but Poe points up to the sky.

  
“We’re up there. I wanted to show you this. We’re up there.”

  
“Up there? What do you mean?”

  
“See that star?” Poe leans in and Finn tries to follow his eyes and his pointing finger to the correct star. “That’s the sun that Starkiller destroyed. We’re far enough away to still see the light from it as a star.”

  
Finn rocks back on his heels. The battle on Starkiller, the sky ever darkening, the snow- these images rush through his mind and Poe is right, he really is up there. If they could see the that ice planet, he would be able to see himself scurrying over its skin, looking for Rey. He would be able to see Poe soaring over his head, guns ablaze. They’re really up there.

  
He is about to say something – he doesn’t know what, but his mouth is opening and he can feel words crowding in his throat – when the star flickers and begins to dim.

  
The night slants into a dreamlike, unreal quality. The star is beginning to dim, Finn thinks distantly, because the First Order’s weapon is draining it, guzzling its energy. He is watching it die again. “Oh,” Poe says quietly, “we really are up there.”

  
The star dims more and Finn-Up-There is picking up the lightsaber. Finn-Down-Here clenches that hand around nothing. He needs to hold something- something in particular. He needs it and his hand won’t be right until he does.

  
The star dims more and Poe takes a step closer. “We’re really up there,” he repeats slowly, like he is tasting his words before he says them. He is coming closer.  
“Yeah,” Finn says. His mind bends around the concept, but it cannot encompass it. He is up there; he is down here. The star is dead; it is still dying. Poe is close enough that their shoulders bump and Finn’s hand itches, itches, itches. He doesn’t even know what their mission here is. He wasn’t really a part of their mission up there either.

  
The star is a faint pinpoint of light now and Finn suddenly wants to stop watching. He doesn’t want to see it shrivel any smaller. He can’t watch it any longer. He turns away, goes back into the cave. He’s not up there, he is only down here.

  
He still sees Starkiller in his mind’s darker corners. It lives in his head and sometimes it makes itself too large to ignore. It takes him back to laying face-down in the snow with his back searing. Unable to move or speak or even think, and eventually slipping into darkness. He doesn’t want to be there.

  
He scratches his palm.

  
“Finn.”

  
He turns around and Poe’s expression is impossible to read in the darkness.

  
“I shouldn’t have. I didn’t know we’d see it- fade like that.”

  
Finn shakes his head. “I see it all the time anyway. Don’t you?”

  
Poe’s silhouette nods. “Guess so.”

  
He pauses and the darkness becomes paired with silence and stillness and Finn has to bump his shoulder against the cave wall to remind himself that he’s there.   
“I have plenty of things I think about all the time,” Poe says eventually. He comes into the cave and sits near Finn. Finn can feel the pressing darkness like a heavy coat, and the silence stretches. There is nothing to say now, but words are clawing at his lungs. Are they asking to be spoken? Finn thinks that if he opens his mouth nothing would come out. There is nothing to say. They were both there, but now they are both here. Reality remains reality, no matter what was up in the sky just a minute ago.

  
They eat because they have to eat. It’s part of what must happen on a mission, so they do it. They were given rations and therefore they must eat rations.   
They eat. Finn usually enjoys watching Poe odd and habitual demolition of his meal. It must be from a thousand identical consumptions of a thousand identical meals on a thousand identical missions for the Resistance. Finn, with a messy twelve missions under his cap, picks his unorganized way through his meal, unregimented and unfamiliar and unhabituated.

  
Yeah, Finn usually likes to watch Poe go through his meal routine. He likes that he can predict every bite that Poe will take, and in which order. It makes him feel like he knows him. One time, only a couple of missions ago, he had mirrored every bite and he and Poe had eaten in sync. He had thought it would be funny. Poe hadn’t even noticed and Finn had felt oddly lonely in his imitation.

  
It was not the only time he had tried to do exactly as Poe did. He had taken his jacket, his droid, his mission. He had known exactly what he was doing. Later, he had mimicked his walk when he first got out of that hospital bed and could not quite remember his own. He had relearned how to hold his blaster by watching Poe because he did not want to hold a weapon like a stormtrooper would. He had wanted to be a true member of the Resistance and Poe- Poe, he was the Resistance. And the Resistance must eat and must do missions and must be able to see Starkiller drain the life from a sun as many times as it encounters it. Finn does what Poe does.

  
His hand itches.

  
He feels trapped. On this planet, and by the darkness and instability of it. In this cave, on a joke he doesn’t fully grasp. By this mission, in a Resistance he knows almost nothing about. By his damn hand, with a longing he can’t even name, let alone understand. No, this is not abrupt. This feeling has been building in his chest since he stood alone looking at the wreck of the TIE Fighter he and Poe had taken from the First Order. He had been trapping himself in the unknown ever since. He would never have guessed that the vast unknown could feel so confining. He is trying to toe its line in the darkness, aware that a single small deviation could send him tumbling back into the known- the life he had never wanted. The unknown is tenuously fragile.

  
“I know what you’re thinking,” Poe says. He’s packing away their plates and utensils. Finn had missed their meal buried in his thoughts about the meal. He can tell Poe is smiling, even without looking over at him. It’s there in his voice. Finn can practically feel it in the air between them.

  
“What am I thinking, Poe?”

  
“Finn, you’re thinking about the Resistance, of course.”

  
“Of course.”

  
“Of course! We’re all thinking about the Resistance. We wake up for the Resistance, we eat for the Resistance. We lay down our heads at the end of the day to dream about the Resistance. We,” he says grandly, “are all the Resistance.”

  
“Just you.”

  
“Me?”

  
“You’re the Resistance.”

  
Poe had been laughing and gesturing along with his well-worn loyal testimony. But he quiets. He stills. His posture is stiff and contained. Finn feels his own smile drop off his face. He is unsure what he said wrong.

  
“You think that?” Poe’s voice is very soft. Finn can still feel that he is tensed, ready to spring at an unknown trigger.

  
Finn sets his chin. “I said it.”

  
“You think that?”

  
“I think it all the time.”

  
And Poe’s tension unravels. A ribbon slipping off of a package. Slowly, and then it’s gone. He sags. This is not relief, Finn realizes. It is something else- something sadder. Finn’s hand itches.

  
“I’m a pilot,” Poe says.

  
“You’re the first member of the Resistance I met.”

  
“We stole that TIE fighter together. I flew it, you shot.”

  
“You blew up Starkiller.”

  
“Who told you that?”

  
“You did.”

  
“Finn.”

  
Finn pauses to let him finish. But Poe doesn’t finish. He lets Finn’s name – it was Poe’s choice for his name, Finn thinks just like he always does when Poe says Finn – he lets it hang in the darkness. Finn thinks about the star flickering in the sky. Poe is up there right now, destroying that parasite of a planet.

  
“You did,” Finn says finally.

  
“We all did.”

  
“All right. But _you_ did.”

  
Poe looks at him. Finn looks back. They can’t read each other’s faces in the darkness but they look deeply anyway.

  
“Finn,” Poe says again and his voice is smaller than before. “That was my fourth mission. Jakku was my second. It was only my second and I got captured.” Poe clears his throat, and when he speaks his voice is a little rough. “You rescued me, you know.”

  
Finn scrubs his hand against the rocky ground, trying to scratch that itch. He needs to grasp something, to fill his hand with something solid. He needs to fill himself up with something heavy. Sandbag his soul to keep himself grounded- present. His mind wants to float and wander in the dark. It wants to slide to his right, slide over to Poe. He needs to shakes that instinct out of his system. He needs his hand to stop itching. He curls it into a fist, but that feels somehow emptier.   
It is too empty, Finn decides. He can’t stand it. His right hand is drawn to cover Poe’s blaster. It is in its holster strapped to his leg and Finn twists his wrist so he can place his palm fully over it without drawing it out of the holster.

  
Poe doesn’t move his leg away, but his voice is urgent. “Finn-“

  
“Just let me.” Finn is embarrassed to hear a crack in his voice that frays the edges of his words.

  
“Finn.”

  
“I’m all right. My hand just-“ He cuts himself off. It sounds too strange to say aloud.

  
Poe licks his lips. “Itches.”

  
The planet stops shaking for a moment- or maybe Finn only imagines it does. He’s already looking at Poe, picking pieces of his expression out of the dark. He tries to look closer, to look into him.

  
“Yeah,” Finn says slowly. “It itches.” He wants to ask so very badly and the fact that he wants to know so much makes him feel that he shouldn’t ask. How do you know? Does yours? He doesn’t ask.

  
Poe puts his hand over Finn’s, pressing it more securely against the blaster. His fingers fill the spaces between Finn’s, his palm is warm and solid.   
“Is that better?”

  
Finn nods.

  
Poe takes a deep breath and Finn thinks he’s going to speak, but he just slips his hand under Finn’s and holds wraps their fingers together. “Is that better?” It’s a whisper.

  
Finn nods, his heart pounding.

  
“You’re the Resistance too, you know that right?” Poe whispers. “I recognized you the moment you took off your helmet. I saw it in your eyes, Finn. I knew who you were.”

  
Their hands should melt into one, Finn thinks distantly from his daze. This is how it should always be.

  
“I’m the Resistance,” Finn says.

  
“You’re the Resistance.”

  
“We’re the Resistance.”

  
“We’re-“

  
They’re laughing and there’s no room in their mouths for words with all that joyful laughter. Finn can’t say what exactly is funny, but he knows that he knows as much as Poe does about it. They created it together.

  
It’s so natural to rearrange their bodies so that their faces are turned towards each other. The pose of their first meeting, the smiles of their first moment of recognition.

  
It’s so natural for Finn to hold Poe’s face between his hands, to rub the pads of his thumbs along Poe’s cheekbones.

  
When their lips meet, it is with months of crushing anticipation crashing together- anticipation that Finn hadn’t even known had been bubbling between them until he felt the hot pressure in his chest, unable to wait even the microsecond between that realization and the moment that his lips touched Poe’s for the very first time. Their lips melt together like their hands did and Finn is falling into Poe, into love, into their future. This is who he is. It is who he can be, who he will be.

  
_Poe, Poe, Poe_ , beats in his heart and he can hear his own name beating in Poe’s in a returning refrain.


End file.
